🔗 Share this article

D&D presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {